


Once More, With Feeling

by clementizing



Category: Call Me By Your Name (2017), Call Me By Your Name - All Media Types, Call Me by Your Name - André Aciman
Genre: Elio's POV, Find me spoilers, First Person, M/M, but not quite canon compliant, mixed book and movie references, set during the canon of Find Me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-10
Updated: 2019-08-10
Packaged: 2020-08-14 07:44:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20188744
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clementizing/pseuds/clementizing
Summary: "It was Oliver's third night in Italy before we had the villa to ourselves."This story is set during the timeline ofFind Me, which I have now read. Please note that it does contain spoilers, but if you are broadly aware of how things end for Elio and Oliver inFind Methen they will not be significant ones.To avoid any spoilers here, a full summary is under the cut.





	Once More, With Feeling

**Author's Note:**

> This story is a re-telling of Elio and Oliver's "second first time" - i.e. the first time they sleep together after reuniting in Find Me. Andre's telling of it was oh-so-vague and I couldn't resist the opportunity to fill in some gaps. As usual, I have tweaked and changed various things to suit my version of the boys. I hope you enjoy it!

It was Oliver’s third night in Italy before we had the villa to ourselves. We waited until it was almost sunset to eat, out on the veranda with only the candles to guide us. The afternoon had been stifling hot, but a thin tongue of lavender twilight rose on the horizon and licked the day’s heat sharply from the sky. I threw a shirt over my shoulders for shelter from the chill, but he stayed barefoot, bare-armed, golden. I had forgotten how much I loved to see him at my table: my Oliver, my most welcome guest.

Dinner had been simple, but for dessert I was out to please. He stood at the counter as I unearthed our old set of ramekins from the back of a drawer - terracotta, chipped and cracked, but they would do - then watched as I slit the vanilla pods, scattered them over the mixing bowl of cream. 

“Creme brûlée?” he guessed.

His voice was amused, incredulous. I knew the look on his face right away: a French dessert? In Italy? I only nodded: yes, I know, how bold of me. We could still read each other that way, in a single glance.

“You won’t get in some kind of trouble?” he said, teasing.

I shook my head, then thought twice.

“Maybe with Mafalda,” I said, “but we won’t tell her.”

“No,” he agreed, “our secret.”

Then he flushed. Once we’d had so many secrets, Oliver and I. They had been a currency between us, old gold coins for us to pass from hand to hand and stash beneath the pillows in the bed we shared, so no one but us would ever hear their tell-tale jangling and know how rich we were. I think it felt new to us then, and wonderful, to finally have another.

*

We settled the house for the night: ferrying in our used crockery, opening out the kitchen windows so that the morning sun wouldn’t scald the air from the room. Oliver was quiet, but when I brought him his pudding freshly cooled from the fridge and set the spoon down at the table, he sat at once and smiled. I smiled too, when he broke the sugar shell too harshly and shards of it flew up to land on the tablecloth like sparks from a fire. I gave him a look to say, first the eggs, now this. He laughed.

“The more it changes,” he said, then shrugged, self-conscious. I lay my hand on his forearm and squeezed to show he didn’t have to be.

“It must be strange for you,” I said, “Being back here, I mean.”

He looked up at me intently, as if my words had unlocked from him something he had wanted to tell me all along. 

“Yes,” he said, “to be here and - to talk with you, like this.”

“Like this?”

“I used to talk to you,” he said quietly, “in my mind, I would - all the time.”

“You did?”

“I did.”

The thought of it pricked a crisis of tenderness in me. I was gripped by an intense desire to see every street on which he had summoned a ghost of me in his mind, eager to know the shape of every word he had put in my imagined mouth, more eager still to touch my tongue to the smudge of sun cream which he had left in his typical haste to get outside to the beach this morning and which I realised then was still blotted on the supple skin of his throat. 

“When?” I asked, “When did you talk to me?”

He sat forward, closer. The glow of the lamp drifted from the wall behind us and shot a nimbus of light in the narrow space between my face and his.

“When things were good,” he said softly, “and when they were bad. When I liked where I was, or when I didn’t.”

Then he looked at me.

“Just to be with you, Elio,” he whispered, “To be with you.”

To be with you, Oliver. To be alone in myself, with you; to say not even a word, but to know that your body and my body occupy the same space and time together. To look at a wall on a nowhere street in Rome which the rest of the world passes by without a glance and see it still utterly alive with you, to touch my hand to it and find you there in the echo of its sun-baked warmth, in the years when you were so far away from me, Oliver.

I had kissed him once already, when we made it breathless to the summit of San Giacomo, the air sticky with sap and rosemary turned smoky with heat. The light had caught him just so, and he had looked so pleased to be there - so happy just to look out over the cove and let me show him the church in the square below, and the pin-drops of boats bobbing on the azure sea, and the froth of villas of which one, nestled in amongst the fruit-speckled trees, was ours - that I could not stop myself from touching my hand to his face and my lips to his. But no sooner had he melted to me than we had heard the distant rabble of laughter as others climbed the same path we had just followed - and so instead of drawing him down into my arms and welcoming him back into my body right there with the wild grass crushed beneath my thighs, we had stopped and pulled apart and walked chastely on, whilst the sun’s rays measured the polite span of open space between us. Yet even that had been enough to soften him to me: on the way back, he had folded my hand into his every time the path became uneven, so that I would not fall, or at least so that if I did, he would fall with me. I loved that when I gave him a taste of intimacy he would give another back to me; it was a kiss of a different kind. 

I hadn’t moved my hand from his arm, so it was easy to travel up over the collar of his shirt, to touch my fingers to the star gleaming at his throat and then at last to hold him cupped from lips to lashes like a butterfly in the palm of my hand. For a moment he rested there, before I saw the fear spark in his eyes and with a jolt and a clatter he was up and away from me. I called his name, once.

“The dishes,” he said, faintly. 

The pounding of the faucet as he stood at the sink did nothing to conceal the tremor in his voice. I understood perfectly. Desire was a plucked string between us, demanding to be heard - but we were afraid to answer it now, after twenty years of waiting. The dishes, the jet lag, the heat, the fear of curious ears listening for every squeak of the bed springs: why ever give in to it, why not string it out, let unslaked temptation hang suspended between us like a bead of juice blossoming at the tip of ripe fruit? Diversion was everywhere, if we chose it.

I circled him slowly in the dim light. I had told him once: all I had to do was find the courage to reach out and touch. Nothing had changed, except that I was braver now, and no sooner had I wrapped my arms around him than the tension slipped out of him as if I had commanded it. I found the pit of his shoulder with my lips, kissed it deeply. His shirt had absorbed the scents of the day: apricots, sun screen, the herbal tang of the garden, all unfolding before me like the top notes of perfume. It reminded me intensely of our first summer together, when he would wander off into the night and come back smelling of the orchards whilst I waited for him, silver-eyed with the anticipation of all the things he would do to me on his return. I was a glutton for our symmetry; I wanted us to cut ourselves from cloth and lay each piece out over and over until we could wrap around the throat of the world. 

“I’m nervous,” he said, just as I had once confessed to him. “It’s been so long -“

“That won’t matter.”

“It’s easy to say that now, Elio.”

“I’ll say it after, too,” I promised.

He scrubbed his forearm across his eyes and sighed, a solemn heave of breath that I felt go through him from head to foot. I stroked my hands over his chest to soothe him. I hated to see him upset. That was how I always knew he was safe with me.

“It is what you want?” I asked, carefully. I thought I knew the answer, but I had to be sure. Before the last syllable had fallen from my mouth, he was already whispering yes.

After that it was very simple. I sunk my hands beneath the hot water until they found his, clutched them both in my own. He would be done with the dishes any minute, he said. I didn’t care. Life may have domesticated him, but I had ways of making him feral again. I traced the downy hair at the nape of his neck with my lips and spoke to him there, where he was impossibly soft. It was the place I felt he heard me best. Oliver, I told him, the dishes will wait. But you and I don’t have to, any more.

*

Everything about our bedroom that night pleased me: Oliver’s shirt, which hung over the back of my rickety desk chair and softly filled and released with each breath of air through the window, the shadows which lingered over our bed, and the gently rumpled sheets which seemed to extend a coy invitation for us to sink back into them again. Outside the air was very still, except for a velvety rustling that rose up from the garden beneath us. I recognised the sound: ripe peaches falling from the tree beside the kitchen window, their furred skins sticking together in the dewed grass below. That pleased me even more.

After so many years of wanting, I could barely think where to begin. I let the moonlight guide me: it shimmered on Oliver’s lips like sunshine on a pearl and I could not let him stay unkissed for another moment. His pulse was wild beneath my fingertips, his skin hot against my own when he pulled me flush to his body on the bed. I licked the seam of his lips apart and tasted him; a potent cocktail of sweet vanilla and wine that had me drunk after only a few sips. Then I slipped my hand between us and gasped when I found him hard already, the faint impression of his heartbeat throbbing beneath my palm. He tore away from my mouth, made a sound almost as if I were hurting him. Too much, I thought, too soon - but should have known better, because in an instant his hand was covering mine. 

We undressed between kisses, untidy and impatient. I was utterly sick of clothes; I would sooner have flung every offending article out of the window than let them keep his precious skin hidden from me for another night. When at last he was naked, I spread him across the sheets and watched him blush again beneath my gaze: a rose-pink bloom that travelled first across his face and then wandered lazily down to his neck. Time had barely changed him, save for his chest, where the golden hair was shot through with silver as if touched by lightning. Decrepit, he joked, when he saw me notice, but I could not bear to hear his self-deprecation. I pressed my hand to his mouth at once and glared at him in warning. The expression in his eyes was half-amused, half-imploring: please. I smudged my finger along his mouth where it was ripest, then my thumb.

"You can have it back," I offered, "but only for kissing."

He listened well.

*

Over the two weeks Oliver was mine, he had become my favourite instrument to play, and as I traced long-lost paths across his skin, I felt the old music stir in me again. He closed his eyes when I stroked the inside of his wrist, sighed when I bowed my head to each nipple, held his breath completely when I flicked my tongue into the wingtip of his hip and ran a teasing line all along it. Against his thigh his cock was swollen, leaking, irresistible. I put my mouth on him with no warning and savoured the rawness of his reaction, how he pressed up to me helplessly, hand shaking as he reached to cup my face. All those fatuous thoughts earlier of letting desire suspend between us: I was fooling no one. I would never waste him, waste us, wouldn’t waste a drop.

I wanted to freeze the moment in amber - our breathing in sync, the twist of the white sheets between his fingers, the feeling that I was a weary traveller who, after decades of exile, had returned at last through the parted city gates to the place he calls home. Don’t do too much, he begged, but too much had no meaning for me when I had lived the ache of not enough for so long. I could barely ration myself, and we were both slick-skinned and gasping for breath by the time I let him go. I pressed one last kiss to the silken spot where he was most sensitive, then lay my hot cheek to the inside of his thigh and basked in the feeling of his hands smoothing over my hair, my face, the crest of each shoulder. Come here, he rasped, and pulled me up to him to be thoroughly kissed, to taste himself on me and me on him, my pleasure which was his and his pleasure which was still, after all this time, indivisibly mine. 

I watched dazedly as he reached into my bedside drawer and clutched the little bottle in his palm. I had stolen away into town one afternoon whilst he napped to buy it, feeling just as daring as I had at seventeen in the dusty farmacia, when I had worn one of his long shirts to hide the outline of the bottle in my pocket on the way home. Back then I had been suffused with the unshakeable conviction that the chemist had looked at me with knowing eyes, that by sunset the whole town would hear about us and would know at last that la muvi star\- whom they all so coveted - had chosen my bed, and me with it. The prospect had secretly delighted me, and still tugged at me now, so much so that I found myself thinking just as I had done then that I would not care if he hurt me, nor ever ask him to stop, that my body could deny him nothing and would only ever speak if it was to plead for more. 

He must have sensed me swooning in this way, for he was perhaps the gentlest he had ever been with me when he trailed his slick fingers slowly between my thighs. I had tried very hard to hold onto the way it felt when he did this, but some of it had slipped away from me: the sense of myself awakening around him, the fact that I could not help the sounds I made and loved to feel the little shivers of his body as he responded to them, the way a touch anywhere could tip-toe softly up my spine and let me feel it everywhere, until it was as if my skin were emulsified in gold. He did not stop until I was open-mouthed and panting against his throat, and when I arched away from the swell that threatened to overwhelm me, he only hooked my thigh over his hip and pulled me deeper into him. I pulled back and saw not even a flicker of fear left in his eyes any more, and the sight of the slim ring of blue almost eclipsed by dark pupil sparked something in me. I reached between us again, squeezed him twice in my palm, and found just enough breath to whisper in his ear: I need this.

It was the truth. Of all my wishful thinking, the searing possibility of having him inside me again had taunted me the most, forever glimmering in the horizon of my mind like a promised oasis that is never found. I think that is why I can barely distil what I felt in the moment when he finally wrapped my hips in his palms and settled me on him with agonising slowness; it is as impossible as trying to pluck from an entire symphony a single note to celebrate. I know that I moaned his name, and that he came up into my arms to steady me, whispering raggedly, I’ve got you as I twined my legs tighter around his waist. I wished more than anything that I could see how we looked together: the pale skin of my body cradled in his golden arms like Midas’ sacrifice, the lean muscle of his back which I imagined would flex like a snake beneath his skin. 

We were both so close, so quickly. Every time I thought I couldn’t burn any hotter, he would arch into me with such impossible, melding intensity that sensation caught in me like a flame and somehow pushed me a little higher. I draped my arms around his neck and clung to him bonelessly, utterly content to let him take what he needed. The prospect of his orgasm exalted me; I barely cared about my own - but at the very last minute he whispered oh Oliver, please and my climax unspun down my spine like a red carpet whilst he cried out against the side of my neck, shuddering inside me.

The world returned to me frame by frame: the blue of his eye, the curve of his ear, the apple of his cheek, each of which I kissed once in turn, slowly. I had time to savour, now. Against my throat Oliver laughed softly, as if he couldn’t quite believe what had happened. It was a vulnerable sound, not unlike crying, and I held him through it as I would through tears. I understood then that when happiness has been away from us for too long, its return cracks like the shell of an egg beneath the skin and for a moment we mistake it for pain. I held one of his hands in mine, then brought it to my lips and kissed it. 

“You haven’t forgotten, Oliver,” I told him, “you remember” - which was my way of saying that he remembered me, remembered us, and that when all is said and done and life has had its way with you, you remember who you are.

*

Afterwards we shared the comfortable silence of two people whose bodies have done all the talking for them. I watched birds flit restlessly from one tree to the next as I rested at Oliver’s side, my head on his shoulder and his arm around my waist. Then I curled closer and settled down on top of him: full body, fuller heart. I was Cheshire-cat pleased with myself. I licked his face tenderly, like an animal tending to its young. His skin tasted softer around his eyes: he had laughter lines there, but only a few. I vowed he’d have five times as many after a year or two with me.

Oliver made a humming noise deep in his chest, low and satisfied. Then he settled me snugly into the crook of his neck whilst his hands stroked up and down my back, squeezing me close. This was the embrace I had been searching for in other people’s arms, deep down knowing all along that only he could ever provide it. We were cheek to cheek. I had forgotten our habit of falling asleep that way, necks entwined like two swans floating on a lake. It was always worth the ache in the morning.

“Let’s go swimming tomorrow,” I murmured against his neck, “when we wake up.”

He caught on right away.

“As long as you don’t hold it against me,” he teased.

“Never,” I said.

Outside there was a muffled thump as another peach descended to the ground.

“Well,” he said wryly, “there goes your next victim.”

We both laughed, but the memory pulled at me and I saw it vividly in my mind: our attic in hot July sun, the old dusty mattress. Him, and me, entwined. His petal pink lips, white teeth sinking into amber flesh. He’d been so fearless. I walked two fingertips along his arm.

“Would you, still?” I asked, as if it were very casual.

“Would you, still?” he replied.

I laughed again. He thrilled me, still. But then he circled my wrist in his fingers and snatched me in close to his body. There was a familiar glitter in his eyes. I gasped, half surprised, wholly aroused.

“You really want to know the answer?” he asked.

“Yes,” I breathed. 

“Then fetch one and find out,” he whispered. 

He knew exactly how to unlock me. Immediately I could imagine the cool appraisal of the moon on my skin as I slid into the garden’s shadows, naked and barefoot, the grass wet beneath my feet as I reached to pluck a peach from the branches like a jewel from a crown. And when I brought it to him and he took it from my trembling hands again, I would tell him at last that all those years ago it was not just the fruit he consumed, but my heart he had devoured along with it.

I looked at him. Beneath his childlike joy at provoking my base instincts, there was an expression of unparalleled tenderness in his eyes. I leaned down and kissed his forehead and his chin and the irrepressible pout of his lips. I could feel him smiling.

“Later,” I whispered.

The night played on.

**Author's Note:**

> I'd had writer's block for a million years (well, nine months, but it felt like a million years) before writing this. It was so nice to revisit these boys and finally have the words flow again! If you're still here, thank you :)
> 
> I'm on Tumblr these days: @clementizingx.


End file.
